New Economic Realities (Corporate Relations with 
Law Enforcement)

Beat Intro
Voiceover
00.08	This is the Beat - a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest 
community policing topics facing our nation.

 Interview
Katherine McQuay
00.15	Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.  We have talked a lot about the new 
economic realities.  What do you think they mean for both the private sector and 
the public sector?  
 
Mike
00.25	What I think they mean is that I think that we often operate under the illusion 
that there will come a time when we get back to quote, unquote, normal.  And I 
think this is the new normal.  And so we've got to design - I've got to set up my 
security office and a police chief has to set up his police department under this 
new reality and quit relying on the fact that we'll be rescued or more money will 
come or everybody will see the essentialness of what it is we do.  That is not 
automatic anymore and I don't think that can be assumed anymore.

Katherine
00.57	You don't think that's going to happen - that even if we get more money we could 
go back to where we were?

Mike
01.03	I don't think necessarily so.  You've got a lot of places where law enforcement 
officers are down and yet the crime is down as well.  So I think we're going to 
have to ask different questions and we're going to have to look at old, traditional 
models of how we've always done our business and maybe think about doing it  
differently.

Katherine
01.20	What do we need to do differently?  How do we need to think about it differently 
and what do we need to do differently?

Mike
01.25	Well I think that one of the things that I bring from my experience at Verizon is I 
didn't come with any baggage.  I didn't come with any idea of how we were 
supposed to do our business.  So that allowed me to ask some very difficult 
questions very early on in my tenure as a chief security officer there. So I wanted 
to know, with a great deal of transparency, what each subunit under me was 
responsible for and what they were doing.  And I can assure you that any chief 
that goes through that same exercise is going to find people doing things that 
number one, they either need to do less of, need to not be doing at all, or perhaps 
need to be doing more of.  But it's going to inform he or she how they can 
rearrange the deck chairs and get more efficiency out of the same number of 
people or even fewer people.

Katherine
02.10	Can you give me an example, too, of what you've done along those lines at 
Verizon?

Mike
02.15	Sure.  Like I said before, I've conducted operational reviews - and that is getting 
at the crux of what everyone was doing and how they were doing it.  I was 
looking at our average investigative time and I was looking at some of the more 
serious cases that we do.  And one of the things I was told is, 'Well, you have to 
understand how long it takes an investigator to go through all of that paper.'  
Well, I had cyber security under me as well and I thought, 'how are we not 
automating this process?  How are we not automating this process of review?'  
The fact of the matter is in most complex cases, the evidence resides in the data.  
So how do we get the data to talk to us automatically?  How do we automate 
that?  So if we have transactions at the front end of a sale that appear to be bad, 
how do we get something that tells us about that in advance?  But the traditional 
investigators and the cyber investigators simply did not want to come and join 
hands.  Why?  Because if we can leverage technology against a loss of 
headcount, then the loss of headcount becomes less threatening.  Rather than 
thinking about how we might better use that headcount, people were resistant 
because they thought 'it's going to mean my job'.  And so one of the things 
you've got to be willing to do is ask the hard questions and press for that.

	I have one other example that I can give you...when I'm looking at our CCTV 
cameras in all of our facilities - thousands of facilities.  Then we started building 
centralized monitoring plants.  But guess what?  In every facility I had an officer 
monitoring the CCTV camera for that facility.  When I centrally monitored that 
capability, we still had that officer monitoring those CCTVs.  Well I said, 'why 
are we doing that?'  Well the answer I got was if he or she sees something, we 
want them to be able to intervene right away.  And I said, 'when's the last time 
that happened?'  Because CCTVs tend to be post-incident, rather than while the 
incident is happening.  And it simply hadn't happened in anybody's memory.  So 
we started using a centralized monitoring plant for what it was intended to do 
and connect that person with the rover at the various facilities. So you get the 
same effect, but with a whole lot less people.

Katherine
04.24	It sounds like what you're saying is we have to look at what's relevant and we 
have to prioritize.  Is that fair to say that law enforcement has to...


Mike
04.33	Absolutely.  You really have to look at what's relevant.  And you know, we've 
labored under the philosophy that if we're doing it, it must be important because 
we wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't important.  Well if you believe that, then you 
believe you're also impervious to any type of change, because everything you're 
doing is relevant - everything you're doing is important.  But the way I would 
challenge a chief is to say okay, let's assume that's true.  Then prioritize it.  Go 
through the exercise if you had to lose 20% of your department tomorrow - what 
would that look like?  How would that be?  And then take yourself through that 
exercise, because that'll do a number of different things to you.  It'll also tell you 
how to push back on those cuts if you can - but with numbers, with hard 
numbers, with hard data.  We've got to stop using so much emotion in terms of 
what we do, because we always want to sound like, if we lose three officers, it's 
going to have a cataclysmic effect on the security of our city.  And that just isn't 
true.  And so we've got to tamp down the emotion, particularly in this economic 
reality we exist in today.  And we've got to figure out 'what does this really 
mean'?  How do I explain this to people so it's not always about innocent women 
and children?  I always wondered about innocent men.  Aren't we innocent too?  
I don't want to just die. (laughs)

Katherine
05.46	It sounds like you're saying if I say I'm down 20 officers from five years ago, 
that's no longer a valid argument.

David
05.54	No, I don't even think it's an argument at all.  I think it's a meaningless 
statement.  Without a lot of other data behind it, it is a meaningless statement.  
So, it's the 'so what' factor.  What you essentially have to say is, 'what does that 
mean?'  Have our response times increased?  Have our resolutions of crimes 
decreased?  What impact has that had?  What tangible impact that a layperson 
can understand?  So just talking about what you had before - it portends the 
argument that there is a magic number out there, below which, a department can 
never go - but it can always go up.  When's the last time a police department 
came in and said, 'our population has shifted, our crime picture is down - we can 
actually decrease officers'?  Probably never.  So all I'm suggesting is that to 
pretend there is a magic number out there - it's just a non-starter.  

	And my people are the same way in the private sector.  When we were given a 
10% cut in 2009, my people wanted me to start with the argument of what they 
took away from us in 2005.  And I said they couldn't care less.  And so I think 
what the public sector has to do, and what police chiefs have to do is get very, 
very good at making sure they have the right metrics, so that when a cut is 
coming, you can make an argument for or against that cut without even doing a 
deep dive because you're keeping the kinds of metrics that matter.  And I think 
that's what's important - I think that's what we have to do.

Katherine
07.23	Last question.  If you were chief in today's environment, what are some of the first 
things you would do?

Mike
07.29	If I was a newly appointed chief and given that in mid-size to large cities, you 
may have a tenure of 3-5 years, the first thing I'd recognize is I don't have 
forever to be effective.  I don't have forever to get to know my job and the scope 
of what we do.  And one of the things I would do is just what I did at Verizon.  
I would do these operational reviews or I'd have my staff do operational 
reviews.  But I would create the questions getting at what is the value that 
subunit gives us.  Is that value still relevant?  Is the way they're doing their work 
still the right way to do it?  Do we have the right people doing it?  In other 
words, do I need sworn officers doing that or could I have civilians doing that 
work?  And so I would ask a host of questions like that, that would get at how 
are we being productive?  And are we being productive in the best and most 
effective manner possible?

Katherine
08.21	Thank you so much, Mike, for joining us today.

Mike
08.23	Oh well thank you for inviting me.


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